


a familiar disappointment

by hapan



Category: Feverwake - Victoria Lee
Genre: Abuse, Canon Compliant, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Face Slapping, Heavy Angst, M/M, Mind Games, No Sex, Partial Mind Control, Past Sexual Assault, Rape/Non-con Elements, face touching, it's just. lehrer being lehrer. that's the tag, on dara's part, thumb in mouth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 16:43:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20781794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hapan/pseuds/hapan
Summary: The first thing Calix does when Dara wakes up is tell him not to leave.A sigh shudders through the boy’s form, which doesn’t stop trembling. The physical symptoms of his illness have largely abated with the suppression of his powers, so Calix supposes the cause must be emotional.Dara squeezes his eyes shut, refusing to look at him. “Just kill me already,” the boy mumbles.A familiar, if distant, disappointment settles in his chest. No one has ever been so good at letting him down as Dara Shirazi.





	a familiar disappointment

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was very much an exercise in writing a monster who believes that he's the only reasonable person in the world. lehrer is a fuck, but he believes it's acceptable to want what he wants because he's the one who wants it, and the fic reflects that. please note the tags!

The first thing Calix does when Dara wakes up is tell him not to leave. 

A sigh shudders through the boy’s form, which doesn’t stop trembling. The physical symptoms of his illness have largely abated with the suppression of his powers, so Calix supposes the cause must be emotional. 

Dara squeezes his eyes shut, refusing to look at him. “Just kill me already,” the boy mumbles. 

A familiar, if distant, disappointment settles in his chest. No one has ever been so good at letting him down as Dara Shirazi.

“You never were able to resist the opportunity to be dramatic. I’ll admit this is an extreme measure, but it’s one you brought upon yourself. I’d ask if I was supposed to just let you die from a slow and terrible illness, but--” Calix leans back in his chair, crossing one long leg over the other. “Clearly we both know what your answer to that would be.”

“I’m not playing this game with you,” Dara says. “Take what you want. You always do.”

Calix would be more likely to say he always _gets_ what he wants, but time and experience have long since proven the futility of trying to change Dara’s mind. He could point out the obvious - that if Dara hadn’t been so determined to make an enemy of him, if he had grown from a quiet and clever child into a quiet and clever ally instead of the mess he had turned out to be, none of this would be necessary.

Calix has exercised patience over the years, but no man is infinite. And the cure for Dara’s illness has provided a unique opportunity to gain insight into one of the rare minds able to resist his magic. He would be a fool to pass up the opportunity in a person who supported him, let alone someone so determined to be an obstruction.

It has been a long time since anyone called Calix Lehrer a fool. 

“Sit up.”

Dara moves before he registers that it wasn’t his idea to do so. A spark of something other than dull resignation blooms over the boy’s face - fear, hatred, some other dramatic reaction that Calix has long since lost the energy to parse. He toys with the idea, every now and then, of showing Dara what a true monster looks like, but to what purpose? He’s made his mind up, and Calix is not in the business of saving idiots from their poor decisions.

“Look at me,” he instructs. It’s not necessary for what he’s about to do, but he wants Dara to watch this coming. Wants to see it himself, the fearful flutter of too-long eyelashes, the anxious bob of his throat. Dara has been a disappointment for so long, but it hasn’t made him any less beautiful.

Dara looks. Calix slides his hand under his chin to steady his face, fingers biting into the hard line of his jaw, long since stripped of any lingering puppy fat. And this isn’t necessary either, but Calix has had a long day, a long week, a long life. More than one complication has been caused by this boy in recent times, so why shouldn’t he take the time to indulge?

Dara looks, and as tiresome as the terror in his gaze is, there’s still a lick of satisfaction at seeing it. Calix become so used to seeing defiance there, a rabid animal desperate to harm anyone, including itself, for no discernible purpose. How nice, to see the impossible tamed.

“I’ve missed this,” he says idly, and it’s not a lie. “Spending time with you without worrying about a knife in my back. Or my front, for that matter. The past few years have been a...trial.” 

There had been a time, once, when being with Dara had been pleasant. Diverting, even. And if Calix has given up on the boy in favour of the infinitely more pleasing Noam Álvaro, well. 

It’s not like Dara hasn’t done the same.

The boy jerks his head back on instinct, struggling to twist out of Calix’s grasp. He simply digs his fingers in deeper, nails scraping skin. Dara, weakened by the drug and Calix’s control, is long past his final defiance; his breath comes in quick little gasps, the rise and fall of his chest visible through the thin white cotton of the pyjamas Calix had ordered him dressed in.

Slipping into his mind is almost too simple, after all these years of denial. The better he knows someone, the easier it is. Calix doesn’t bother to savour it, shifting through thoughts and feelings and the bombardment of sensory experience with brutal efficiency. The various political machinations of the past few years are nearly an afterthought, nothing brilliant or world-shaking to be found in Dara’s attempts to halt his second rise to power. 

He’s looking for something specific. _Noam_, he prompts, and down comes the deluge. Hunger, desperation, need, need, need. A faint smile slices his mouth as he sieves through memories, careful not to destroy anything, just as careful to examine every inch. Dara whines, a pathetic sound that Calix is more than familiar with, although usually in different contexts.

“Stop,” the boy whispers, and it seems as though it takes all his little strength just to push the word out. Calix ignores it.

“You were obsessed from the very beginning, then,” he remarks, watching the memory of Noam through Dara’s thoughts, the lingering gaze on several points of interest (throat, wrists, the narrow bend of his waist, let it never be said that Calix had no influence on Dara’s hobbies).

_Not obsessed_, Dara protests before he can help himself, and Calix puts up with the influx of want, care, love, love, before redirecting his thought process with a sigh. As though there’s a difference. As though Dara’s inability to think of anything except Noam for the last few months has led him anywhere except here, to the grasp of his supposed enemy.

A particular image pricks his attention. Dara, leaving a lesson in which he’d continued to be a disappointment. Looking back, seeing Noam and Calix both cast in the hazy afternoon light streaming through the windows of his study. A tangle of emotion clouding his thoughts, jealousy overwhelming all of them, and Calix huffs a laugh because it’s not clear which one of them Dara is jealous of.

He’d expected, of course, that Dara’s hysteria had been exactly that - a desperate cry for attention from a child who had insisted he be treated like an adult, and hadn’t been able to cope with the consequences. To see it laid out so clearly, though, this abject failure to even hate him properly - if it was left in Calix to be embarrassed, he might just manage it on Dara’s behalf.

The obsession spirals quickly, Dara’s mind occupied by Noam, Noam, Noam. For someone who has accused Calix on more than one occasion of unethical use of powers, he certainly does live in Noam’s head, surviving off scraps of attention, the much slower build of Noam’s own attraction. Dara squirms, unable to stop looking at Calix, but desperate to be out of his hold, away from him.

“He asks after you,” Calix remarks, and the boy stills. Hardly dares breathe, for fear he might miss what Calix says next. “Of course, he thinks you’ve lost your mind, but who could blame him? You weren’t exactly the picture of sanity the last time he saw you.”

He pages through memories to the exact second he had relieved Noam of Dara’s fear mongering. Lingers in the pure devastation of Dara realising all his plotting had been for nothing. Calix had won. Calix would always win.

“Nonetheless,” he continues, “you’ve made an impression on him. One that I see no purpose in relieving him of.”

_For the time being_ sits between Calix’s pleasant smile and Dara’s wide-eyed terror. He’s seen just how easy it is now, for Calix to erase whole moments, memories from people’s minds. It would be simple, he thinks to disappear Dara from Noam’s consciousness entirely. Or perhaps not entirely. Perhaps, he could leave him only with those moments of division, distaste. He can see Dara thinking about it, too.

“Please,” the boy rasps, and Calix sighs to see him so easily broken. “Please, L - _sir_. You’ve won, you’ve already won. You have everything you want.”

“Not quite.” He draws his fingers along the sharp cut of Dara’s jaw, but this boy has always been soft for him. His thumb slides over plush lips, smearing spit and panic in equal amounts and in Dara’s mind, Calix sees the first time he kissed Noam. Sees how desperate he had been to reassure him that he was wanted. That _Dara_ wanted him. “I wanted you to be so much more than what you are, Dara.”

Here and now, Dara trembles under the weight of his touch and his words in equal measure. But Calix hasn’t told him to stay in place, only to stay in the apartment. Certainly, he has to look at him, but he could do that from the other side of the room. And yet he makes no effort to flee, or even move, and Calix can feel no intention from him to do so. Another long-held suspicion confirmed, although Calix had never expected to find it disproven.

The memory unspools between them. The truth is that Calix has already seen this moment, picked thought and image and sensation from Noam’s oblivious mind. He knows Dara well enough to interpret his actions from Noam’s point of view, but the satisfaction of being right remains as sweet as ever with the swelling cacophony of _fuck me love me love you please you_ that roars through Dara’s memory. The boy tugs on Noam’s belt loops, crowds him onto the bed, hardly gives him the chance to say _no_ now, does he, even though Noam is clearly gagging for it.

“You could have been great,” Calix murmurs, pressing his thumb into Dara’s lower lip, drawing it down past teeth, pink gums flushing white under the strain of his touch. Saliva pools in the little divot he’s created, Dara’s rabbit-breaths puffing hot over his skin. “A witching worthy of the name. I could have had a son to be proud of. Instead, I ended up with a slut.”

_Do you fuck all of your children, Lehrer?_

The spitfire thought shoots out so fast that Calix can’t even be proud of Dara for showing some spine, it’s so clearly unintentional. He draws his hand away from the boy’s mouth and absently wipes his thumb on his cheek before he backhands him across it. The crack of flesh on flesh echoes throughout the room, and Calix digs mental fingers deeper into the memory, hears Dara’s refusal to turn the light out as though that has some meaning, feels Noam’s tongue work over bruises _he_ had marked into Dara’s skin, watches Dara fuck up one of the few things that ever meant anything to him because the boy’s capacity to ruin things for himself is exceeded only by his capacity to ruin them for other people.

Dara’s head snaps to the side with the force of the blow, and then snaps right back, compelled to keep looking at him. His mouth hangs open pathetically, scarlet staining his skin and ready to shout to the world exactly what he is, as though Calix is ever going to let the world see this boy ever again.

“Do you think about it?” he asks, gripping Dara’s chin hard enough to paint purple near that red. The boy whimpers, does nothing to stop him as he shoves his thumb inside his open mouth, presses down on his tongue. Holds him place. “Noam doesn’t let himself, but you’ve never had his kind of restraint, have you, Dara? Answer me.”

He’s out of patience for Dara’s prevaricating. The boy had said to take what he wanted, and Calix has no intention of denying him. The order, backed by magic, forces a sound from Dara’s throat, his head pulling pitifully at Calix’s grip to shake _no_. He doesn’t have Noam’s restraint.

He doesn’t have a lot of Noam’s better qualities.

“Is it fear or fantasy, I wonder?” he continues. “We’ve spent so much time alone together lately, Noam and I. And you’ve been in his head, the same way I’m in yours now. You know how he feels about me, don’t you? You know what he wants.” He pushes his thumb further back, dragging Dara’s head up until a choked sob splutters around his hand. “He’s so caught up on you now, but for how long? Do you think he would wait for you, Dara? Poor, pathetic, mad boy. Do you think you’re worth that much to him, when the whole world lies at his feet?”

Dara mumbles something now, or tries to, lips forming shameless around the shape of Calix’s thumb, and he’s content to watch the boy struggle. It’s hardly a complex thought he’s trying to express, just _please, please_, reduced to begging by hardly anything at all. So convinced he’s being tortured, as though he didn’t bring this all down on his own head.

_Please don’t make him forget me_.

Calix mulls the thought over. It’s tempted him more than once. Noam’s constant badgering over Dara’s state has proved irritating, and for all his taunting, he doesn’t foresee it letting up any time soon. That being said, there’s precious little left in Noam’s life to control him with, should he prove less than amenable to Calix’s plans. He doesn’t doubt his ability to be convincing, but extra leverage never hurt anyone. 

And Dara has always looked so sweet, begging.

He tugs his hand from the boy’s mouth. Wipes the saliva off on a handkerchief this time. Caresses the mark on his face, eases the hurt with a pulse of healing magic that has those beautiful eyelashes fluttering, caught between relief and trepidation. Dara knows as well as Calix does that a wound healed is just an opportunity to wound again. He sits back, drops the compulsion forcing Dara to look at him, smiles as the boy keeps a wary eye on him anyway. Sometimes, Calix thinks, he isn’t a total loss.

He waves a hand. Dismissive, encouraging, Dara can take it how he wants. Calix has long stopped caring what motives the boy gives him. So long as he gets the results he wants.

“Convince me,” is all he says, and settles in to enjoy the show.


End file.
